People are interested in meeting or connecting with other people to foster rewarding relationships whether for business, shared interests, or romance.
Prior art online people matching approaches include social networking sites and dating sites. In some of these prior art processes and systems, there is a limited degree of automation in the generation of recommendations of people that might be of interest to potentially meet online or offline, or to potentially include in a contact group. These automated recommendations rely on determining the degree to which information within profiles that are explicitly provided by users of the system have similarities. This approach is limited by the amount of information that is, or can be, explicitly provided by the respective parties, and by the quality and sincerity of the information provided by the parties.
Further, in prior art online people matching processes, one of the parties has to overtly make contact with, or express interest in, a second party of interest. There can be an embarrassment factor for one or both parties that can inhibit such overt and transparent acts of expressing an interest in making contact, as a party's overture may be rejected. Or the overture may be accepted by the second party, but only for the purposes of not embarrassing the first parry. In other words, acceptance may potentially be insincere, which is an uncomfortable situation for both parties.
These problems with prior art systems and processes both inhibit the development of contacts and relationships that would be mutually rewarding, as well as creating “contact inflation” of “mercy” relationships that have little or no value to one or both of the parties.